There are a wide variety of business and legal applications where it becomes necessary to sequentially identify documents or individual pages of documents. This is normally necessary when providing copies of these documents or individual pages to other parties, thus assuring the party receiving the documents that they have received every document or individual page in the series. In the legal profession, it is common practice for the judges to require plaintiff's and defendant's counsel to submit documents to the court that are identified by a unique page number within a universe of individually numbered documents. Typical documents which have these requirements are the documents that have been produced during discovery by all parties.
The process of assigning sequential page numbers to a large volume of documents (often greater than 1,000,000 pages) is a tedious, time consuming and labor intensive task. The process typically requires assigning one person at a time to affix a sequential number to each page from the first page through the last. Numbering from beginning to end provides a continuous sequence of numbers as evidence that there are no omitted documents (implied by missing numbers in the sequence).
The prior art method of sequentially labeling these documents has been to use a hand operated stamping machine. These stamping machines are normally a manually operated ink stamp which is capable of sequentially changing the number which is being stamped. For the convenience of the individual doing the stamping, the prior art hand stamping machines have been developed to offer a variety of patterns by which they change their number. This can include after every page, after every other page or number by twos. The hand stamping machines have been around for numerous years and while they have been effective in providing a means for sequentially numbering a series of documents, they are not without their problems.
One problem associated with these prior art hand stamping machines is the inconsistency with which the identifying number is printed. The hand stamping machine is an ink stamp which relies on various factors to insure a legible stamped number. These factors include the amount of ink available on the stamp pad, the pressure at which the stamp is applied, the flatness or consistency of the document being stamped, the alignment of the tumblers containing the individual numbers as well as various other factors. When any one or more than one of these factors are less than optimum, the quality and legibility of the stamped number will deteriorate.
Another problem associated with the prior art hand stamping machines is the handling of the documents which need to be stamped. When numbering each page, great care must be given to place the sequential number on a page location which will not obscure the contents of the original document. This can mean a constant movement or rotation of each document in order to properly locate the sequential number. When using a hand stamping machine, the operator is required to dedicate one hand to the hand stamping machine itself thus leaving only one hand free to manipulate stacks of original documents. Thus the time involved in placing these sequential numbers on a large number of documents is substantial.
An additional problem associated with the prior art hand stamping machines is the amount of physical strength and endurance required from the operator to maintain a productive pace in processing the documents. The continuous and repetitive movements required to operate the hand stamping machines for a large volume of documents will rapidly lead to fatigue which will in turn affect both the speed at which documents are processed as well as the legibility of the numbers being stamped.
Further, some documents must also be identified, on occasion, with additional descriptions such as "Confidential" or "Protected". In addition, it may be desirable to place some additional type of notation on various subjects of documents within a series without affecting the sequential numbering of the series of documents. Finally, with the increasing use of computers to track and inventory documents, a bar code may be desirable or required on each document in addition to the sequential number. For each of the above mentioned needs or requirements, the hand stamping machine are incapable of producing the additional information during the hand stamping process. Thus, an additional separate stamping or identification procedure must be performed.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus for sequentially identifying individual documents or pages within a series of documents which overcomes the above mentioned problems associated with the prior art hand stamping machines.